A girls walks to school in Saudi ArabiaBack in Saudi Arabia, some changes have been made to the curriculum in recent years—changes similar to, but not as far-reaching as, those at the Islamic Saudi Academy outside Washington, D.C. Now any passages relating to Walaa wal Baraa (the question of whether Muslims should associate with non-Muslims) and jihad have been removed from all Saudi textbooks. But Saudi analysts say these deletions have done little to address how the curriculum might have led to violence in the past.
"You can't just remove a section of a book and call it change," says Yehya al Amir, who himself once followed the strict Wahhabi-salafi line and recently wrote a book on the origins of modern Saudi extremism. "If you want to change the curriculum, you have to put forward an entirely new way of life, a new ideology."